1. Turns out a victim of sexual crime can be a victimizer, too.
2. I’m talking about Asia Argento. The Times reported Sunday that the Italian actress and filmmaker paid a man hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep quiet about a 2013 incident in which she plied a then-17 year old Jimmy Bennett with alcohol before sexual assaulting him.
3. This is news in its own right, but it was news for another reason.
4. Argento is one of the many faces of the #MeToo movement. She is among dozens who have accused movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, rape or other crimes.
5. The apparent concern is that Argento’s own alleged crime will discredit #MeToo and its goal of raising awareness of inequities of power between the sexes.
6. I don’t see why it should.
7. Argento is not Weinstein’s only accuser, for one thing. For another, being a perpetrator of sexual crimes doesn’t invalidate or discredit being a victim of sexual crimes. Social scientists have documented the pattern of victims becoming victimizers over time.
8. More importantly, I think, is that #MeToo ought to include not just women, but children.
9. To fulfill its great potential as a transformative social movement, it ought to include, say, the more than 1,000 kids (now adults) who were preyed on, abused, assaulted, and raped for seven decades by Catholic parish priests in Pennsylvania.
10. In my view, the point of #MeToo is not only to make us aware of inequities of power between the sexes but to bring light to the norms, habits and institutions that go into hiding abuses of power.
11. Whether it’s lawyers protecting a Oscar-winning mogul’s reputation or it’s bishops protecting the Catholic Church, the evil is the same.
